'User friendly' does not compute with mobile makers

Anyone ever had any difficulty transferring contacts from one phone to the next? Does 10 days to get your new Blackberry working and synchronised with your enterprise email system, and getting your old phone contacts into the new phone sound familiar to anyone?

Has anyone resorted to simply typing them in?

While I use Nokia/Blackberry without the Blackberry bit, I have recently experienced attempting to connect to the enterprise and get the contacts from another brand of phone into a Blackberry 8100. What a hoohaa.

While being equipped with blue-tooth, and every other type of connectivity, you might suggest the obvious - simply copy them to the SIM, swap phones and copy the address from the SIM into the new phone.

Yeah right. The SIM does not hold all the data fields that were in the phoneA address book, and phoneA doesn't talk to phoneB properly. The names may come out shortened and the address and secondary numbers may disappear altogether. The only recourse was to send them via blue-tooth one at a time to the laptop and then sync them up automatically. Well that's useless - especially when the phone defaults to sending it to the Outlook Express address book on the laptop (I've never even used that) and not the Outlook/Exchange address book. Simple just import them. NOT so simple. Try it.

I approach these types of issues, not as an IT guru, but as an average user and refuse to resort to higher skills or lateral thinking to carry out any task on a consumer device. If it is not easy and intuitive - then throw it away immediately (or ask for a refund).

Anyone else have any trouble with these new wonder devices?

All I can ask is who are the idiots designing these things and have they forgotten they're supposed to be designing for idiots too? Do they think we've all got nothing better to do than read a misleading 95 page manual or whatever? Get real.

I foresee the emergence of secure address book and mail providers who'll automatically swap/restore all your stuff over automatically when you either throw out, lose or just get sick of the latest fad mobile device you carry.

Perhaps it's an idea for RIM? Set up a service for Blackberry buyers which brings all your data into your new Blackberry for you.

It's certainly an argument for simplicity. I suspect that we're all better off anyway without our 'instant mail' on our phones and go back to checking our email the old way - when we actually feel like - or have time to read it. The alternative is for someone to actually call you and talk to you if it's really all that urgent.